Gingrich Boom Is Just Latest Republican Bust: Margaret Carlson

Nov. 23 (Bloomberg) -- In the Republican primary, everyone
will get a chance to be a front-runner, even, apparently, the
left-for-dead Newt Gingrich. With just six weeks to go before
voting begins in Iowa, could Gingrich have just enough time to
prove himself viable before history repeats and he self-destructs?

Unlike past campaigns, there has been no barrier to entry
in this Republican field, where the less you know, seemingly the
better. Gripped by anti-intellectualism, the party has
successively swooned over Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Texas
Governor Rick Perry and Herman Cain.

Perry repaid the infatuation by sleepwalking through
debates, ultimately looking like a fifth grader who didn’t do
his homework when he couldn’t, oops, remember a third Cabinet
department he was hellbent on destroying. Cain came to Perry’s
rescue, making the Texas governor look like Einstein after Cain
required a political lifetime to summon a position on Libya --
only to come up empty.

Thanks, Herman.

In Gingrich, Republicans at least have a candidate who,
unlike Cain, understands that the Taliban aren’t threatening to
take over Libya (although Gingrich was for President Barack
Obama’s intervention there before he was against it).
Republicans can be certain that Gingrich’s overactive brain
won’t freeze when confronted with rudimentary questions. It may,
however, overheat.

Gingrich has a hundred ideas, many of them half-baked, when
a single consistent theme would suffice. He loves listening to
his own voice and is so dazzled by his rhetorical skills that he
believes he can wriggle out of the very tight spots in which he
invariably wedges himself. The most recent example was his claim
that he was paid by Freddie Mac not as an influence peddler, but
for his advice as a “historian.” Bloomberg News subsequently
revealed that his fees had totaled more than $1.6 million, which
is a whole lot of history.

A Second Look

In giving Gingrich a second look, conservatives are bound
to see some ugly things. Before reversing his position under a
barrage of conservative criticism, Gingrich called the Medicare
reform championed by Republican Representative Paul Ryan “right-wing social engineering.” Earlier this year, his campaign
imploded as Gingrich decamped with his wife for a cruise of the
Greek isles (which he now characterizes, incredibly, as a
prescient fact-finding mission to study Greece’s debt problem).
When he returned, his staff quit.

In addition to a longstanding credibility problem, Gingrich
has committed multiple heresies against the conservative faith.
He made an advertisement with House Democratic leader Nancy
Pelosi in which together they promoted global-warming awareness.
Gingrich called it “probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done
in recent years,” an admission that won’t necessarily appease a
Republican base convinced that global warming is a fraud
perpetrated by scientists.

In 1986, Gingrich backed amnesty for illegal aliens and, as
former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has gleefully pointed
out, Gingrich was one of the many Republicans who expressed
support for an individual mandate to buy health insurance before
that idea was adopted by Obama.

While conservatives don’t much like Romney’s variable
history on abortion, Gingrich, who recently converted to
Catholicism and says he’s pro-life, didn’t do much for the pro-life cause in the 1990s when he was the second-most-powerful
person in Washington. He did not defund Planned Parenthood or
pass the human-life amendment. In a high-profile Republican
primary in a New York special election in 2009, he endorsed the
pro-choice candidate before she dropped out of the race.

Influence Peddling

These are the kinds of things that make conservatives’
blood boil. And that’s before we get to Gingrich’s post-congressional life. For more than a decade he has exploited his
insider credentials to embed himself in the interlocking and
lucrative system of special interests and influence peddling.
For one paying client, Gingrich said that Medicare could save
more than $33 billion a year if it were to encourage patients to
sign “advance directives” to limit end-of-life care, a policy
that Sarah Palin has since relabeled “death panels.” As
historian Gingrich tries to explain away his work for Freddie
Mac without actually disclosing what he did, he risks digging
himself deeper into the Washington muck that the Tea Party
abhors.

Gingrich has so many missteps to explain, he has set up a
website featuring his own negatives (well, some of them) and
respective explanations. Lots of luck there. It took a surge in
the polls for his daughter to explain that Gingrich’s visit to
his wife’s hospital bedside as she recovered from cancer surgery
was not, as widely reported, to tell her that he wanted a
divorce. He just wanted to visit.

For Republicans, Gingrich’s rise and eventual collapse may
prove more embarrassing than the boom-and-bust cycles of
previous candidates who claimed to be the One Who Can Stop
Romney from gaining the nomination. Conservatives have to forgo
so many principles -- three marriages? -- to elevate Newt, that
there’s almost nothing left.

And for what? To fulfill their desire for another ritual
humiliation of Mitt Romney? Someday soon they will probably have
to accept that the only surge that matters is the one that leads
Romney to the Republican nomination.

(Margaret Carlson is a Bloomberg View columnist. The
opinions expressed are her own.)